Muze

"Upon arising from bed, my mind was assaulted with these words: you will die soon. As long as you are alive, you have a full range of options. Take what you want; take WHATEVER you want."
In the near future, the world becomes enraptured by a mystery drug called Muze, which promises to boost men's confidence and help them find the woman of their dreams. After Muze becomes a hit among the incel community, one man becomes suspicious after his friend begins taking the drug and then "ascends," vanishing without a trace. His investigation into his friend's disappearance leads him to begin taking Muze himself, revealing a wider plot involving a pharmaceutical firm, a suicidal mental patient, a young woman bred to be the ultimate temptress, an amoral doctor, and more.
Described as "Joker before Joker," The Columbine Pilgrim is an affecting and twisted examination of loneliness, bullying, and revenge. Andy Nowicki's novella is a look at the forgotten man: his trials, his self-deceptions, and what he becomes capable of when the world drives him to madness.
Muze is a disturbing glimpse at loneliness, sexual manipulation, and drug addiction in modern America. Andy Nowicki's novella offers a sympathetic portrait of the men left behind by the sexual revolution, a condemnation of how Big Pharma preys on unhappy people, and an examination of the symbiotic relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the government.
"Andy Nowicki's Muze is a dystopian cautionary tale, tailor-made for zoomers, doomers, and fatal romantics." — Naama Kates, Incel
"When we talk about the 'Great American Writer,' we essentially mean pale shadows of European ones, awkward transplants in a stubbornly alien soil, your Hawthornes, Faulkners, Fitzgeralds, and Wolfes. We do not talk about Andy Nowicki, but we should. American culture, having arrived in the New World in a packing case, has constantly struggled to reverse-engineer its own mythic base while hanging onto some elongated transatlantic bloodline. But Nowicki's work, including this, his latest and possibly darkest novella, is rooted in its own dank soil, in its own effervescent time and space, namely the present-day myth-zone of our godless yet hyper-real age, a world defined more by memes than myths: ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, 9/11, MKUltra, reptilian rulers, moon landing hoaxes, and the odd, uncanny coincidences that occasionally glitter like dew on a spider’s web. These are our Iliads and Ossians. Muze follows the spiders that creep along such threads into a world of mind-altering substances, blackmailed billionaires, Pizzagate-esque elites, and soul-destroying cabals. Nowicki is a druid in this world, his pen a mighty staff with which he paces through its dark forests, using the pointed shadows of fiction to illuminate and comment on our increasingly errant reality." — Colin Liddell, author of Interviews and Obituaries
"Muze is what happens when you mix Eyes Wide Shut, The Exorcist, and Alex Jones conspiratorial politics. What makes Nowicki's latest novella disturbing is that, as absurd as its premise seems, it's closer to what actually goes on in our modern world than many are comfortable to admit." — T.J. Martinell, author of The Pilgrim's Digress and The Legend of Forenia: The Twilight Kingdom